Neal Wood

A Marxist scholar of the history of political thought, Neal Wood (10 September 1922 – 17 September 2003) located political ideas within social relations, property forms, and popular struggles, writing on topics as variant as the British Communist Party, John Locke, Aristotle, Edmund Burke, and St. Augustine.

Born in Los Angeles, Wood volunteered for the Royal Air Force before the United States entered the Second World War. After four years in the R.A.F., he was drafted into the U.S. Air Force and served in Italy. After the war, the G.I. Bill helped him to study at the University of California, Berkeley, from which he graduated in 1951 with a degree in history. From 1955 to 1957, he studied at Cambridge University for his Ph.D. His doctoral thesis, Communism and British Intellectuals, was published in 1959.

Between 1958 and 1963, Wood taught at Columbia University. He then accepted an appointment at the University of California, Los Angeles before taking up, in 1966, a chair in political science at the newly established York University in Toronto, Canada. He and his wife, Ellen Meiksins Wood, with whom he co-authored several studies, became Canadian citizens. He retired from York in 1988, and settled in England a decade later, where he died of cancer in Devon.

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